Q&A with award-winning actor Geraldine James – five key takeaways
Monday 23 March 2026
One of the UK’s most respected and admired actors, Geraldine James, shared insights into her creative process during a Q&A with students.
The award-winning actor, whose recent credits include Downton Abbey (Universal Pictures), Anne with an E (CBC/Netflix) and Rosalind in As You Like It (Royal Shakespeare Company) spoke about her training, her career, preparing for a role and how she keeps performances fresh during long theatrical runs.
Here are five takeaways from her Q&A.
Preparation: read the text, then read it again.
I’m starting a play in a couple of weeks and I was reading it for about the fifteenth time on the train up here. Everything you need to know is in the play. I’ve just read Anthony Hopkins’ autobiography, and he says that when he’s preparing for a job he simply reads the script again and again and again.
Protect your creativity.
In the early 80s I was in Jewel in the Crown playing an uptight, middle-class English girl in India. It was a fabulous part and the series was massively popular. After the series finished, I got sent scripts every day to play uptight, middle-class English girls. It was a slot I could very easily of fallen in to, but fortunately I had an agent who had my back and that enabled me to take a risk and wait for something different, which ended up being a comedy. I always want to feel challenged as an actor. If I already know how to play a role I don’t want to do it; if it frightens me – that's much more interesting.
We’re not just doing this for the audience; we’re also doing it for ourselves. We have to nurture and take care of our creative selves by challenging them; otherwise, you’ll get bored and tired, and when that happens the work suffers.
Every character needs a secret.
I always try to find something about the character that nobody else knows. It’s not for other people, it’s for me, and it isn’t necessarily about the play. It simply gives me something extra to fall back on.
These secrets help me during recovery, which I think is as important as action in a performance. I do something, then I recover from it - and in that recovery I fall back on what we used to call my ‘inner’. That’s where my secrets and my history live, things that only I need to know about. If you’re doing the same thing night after night, it can be exhausting. But if you have these secrets, you can explore how they influence the way you play a scene - and whether you choose to reveal them.
Geraldine James with Head of Acting David Salter. Photography: Brian Roberts
Theatre reflects the truth back to us.
When I was performing in Death and the Maiden at the Duke of York's Theatre, I noticed a man waiting by the stage door all day. As I left that night, I asked, “Are you alright?”
He told me he had been waiting to speak to me. “I have never understood my mother and the way she behaves until I saw this play,” he said. “The character you’re playing, Paulina, is my mother.”
He explained that she had experienced something terrible as a child, and that the performance helped him understand her behaviour.
That’s why we do theatre.
Be your true self.
I was lucky to train at the Drama Centre in Chalk Farm, which sadly no longer exists, and they were deeply interested in us as individuals. They wanted to draw out what was unique about each of us. I think that’s incredibly important.
Don’t try to become what you think people want you to be. Social media can be misleading and reductive - it encourages everyone to look and behave the same way. But you are all different, all important, and all valuable.
Be brave. Decide what you want to do — and tell people.
